Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery) Page 20

  Even the dessert was straight out of Tante’s kitchen: bread pudding. But here he had to admit that Nonna Natalia’s budino di pane, had Tante Frieda’s ofenschlupfer beat by a mile. Frieda made up for overcooking everything she cooked on the range by under-baking everything she did in the oven. Her “famous” bread pudding was a crustless, sodden, overly sweet lump of dough, edible because it had cinnamon and raisins in it, but nothing to look forward to. Nonna Natalia’s budino was another thing altogether, brown and crunchy on top, delicate as a fine soufflé inside, only slightly sweetened, and filled with perfectly cooked apples, figs, and pears; as warming to the soul as it was to the body as it glided down his throat. Eating it was enough to make him forgive Nonna Natalia for her ossobuco, and he happily spooned up a second helping from the family-style bowl it had come in, as did most of the others.

  Only as they finished their desserts, pushed back from the table a little, and turned to their espressos, biscotti, and glasses of Vin Santo, did the talk return from food and wine to the events of the day.

  Luca loosened his belt a notch or two, shoved his chair back from the table, and patted his belly. “Well. I suppose, except for Linda, none of you guys have heard the latest development from the Cesare branch of the family.”

  “We know about the wrongful death suit, if that’s what you mean,” Marti said.

  “No, that was hours ago, ancient history. This is a weird new twist.”

  “This sounds bad,” Gideon said.

  “It’s not good. You remember when Severo went out to call his attorney? He couldn’t wait to tell her she might as well forget about suing us, because, what do you know, babbo couldn’t have killed Nola, being dead himself at the time?”

  Gideon nodded. “Sure.”

  “Well, it worked. She listened to what he had to say, she took an hour to think it over, and she did it. She dropped the suit.”

  “And this is not good, why?” John asked.

  “Because, instead of suing Franco for four million or whatever it was, now she’s challenging the entire will. She wants it declared invalid.”

  “On what grounds?” Marti asked.

  Luca waited while Amalia returned with the bottle to refill the glasses of those who wanted more Vin Santo. Only Gideon declined: too sweet for his taste. He considered asking if there was any brandy, but decided it was safer to let it pass.

  “So, what you think?” a smiling Amalia asked in English when she’d finished pouring and setting the bottle down on the table for their continuing use. “Pretty good dinner, no?”

  Everyone, Gideon included, agreed that it had been superb, even better than they’d expected. Only when she departed, broadly smiling, did Luca come back to Marti’s question.

  “On what grounds? On the grounds that, since Pietro died before Nola—weeks before her, according to the brilliant, world-famous Skeleton Detective . . .”

  Gideon sighed. “Gee, why do I have this feeling that I’m about to get blamed for something?”

  “. . . that, since Nola outlived Pietro, everything should technically have gone to her when he died.”

  “Wait a second,” Gideon said. “I thought his will left pretty much everything to Franco—the winery and all—with you and Nico and Cesare getting monthly stipends for a few years. Is that not right? Or did he leave something to Nola too?”

  Luca poured some more wine for Linda and for himself, and passed the bottle to John. “No, that’s not right, not quite. The two of them had—I forget what it’s called in English—they had the same will—”

  “A joint will?” Marti suggested.

  “That’s it, yeah. Consisting of one paragraph. Three sentences. Exactly a hundred and fifteen words; I counted them once.”

  “Pretty short for a will disposing of an estate like that,” said John.

  “No kidding. And they didn’t even have that until Severo practically forced them into it, kicking and screaming.”

  The Cubbiddus, it seemed, like many of their brethren in Barbagia at that time, didn’t believe in written wills. When a man died, his possessions passed to his eldest son, and that was that. Attorneys? Probate? The courts? No need for them, not in those mountain villages. Everyone knew the way it worked, and no one would think of contesting it when it happened. For one thing, nobody had anything worth fighting over, but even more important was the fear of what they called malocchio, the evil eye that was always on the lookout for you to make some slip, leave some opening that would let the spirits of misfortune and calamity into your life. And one way to do that, sure to bring laughter to those malevolent entities, was to “make plans” for your own death or that of someone you loved, or to talk about it, or even to think about it. So . . . no wills. And the authorities couldn’t be bothered with doing anything about it, not if it took going into those primitive, bandit-ridden mountain villages.

  Luca paused, remembering. “I know this sounds like something from the Middle Ages, but, you know, I was born there, and I lived there, in Nuragugme—population forty-two, including us—until I was fifteen and babbo got married and moved us all here. Believe me, that’s the way it was, and that’s the way the two of them were. And the way they stayed. You’d think a guy with so much on the ball, all that business sense, couldn’t possibly be that superstitious—”

  “No, I wouldn’t think that at all,” said Gideon. “Smart people can be pretty dumb when they venture outside of their own ballparks.”

  Luca smiled. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Anyway, for years they refused to consider having wills at all. It drove Severo nuts, and then finally—this was, like, no more than five years ago—”

  “Four years,” Linda said. “They did it just after I got here.”

  “Four years ago,” said Luca, “he finally convinced them things were different here, and if they didn’t have a will, there’d be hell to pay when they died. I think they agreed to sign the thing just to make him stop talking about dying.”

  “Well, what did it say, Luca?” Julie asked.

  “It didn’t leave everything to Franco; they left everything to each other.”

  “Each other?” John said. “So how did Franco wind up with the winery?”

  “Here’s the way it worked: The first sentence says that they leave everything to each other. The second one says something like ‘If my spouse should predecease me, then I leave everything to my beloved son Franco,’ with those stipends to the others.”

  “To Franco? Nothing about Cesare? I’m surprised Nola would have gone along with that,” Gideon said. “I only met her a few times, but she struck me as being pretty strong-minded. I’d have thought she’d have fought for more than that for him.”

  “She probably did,” Luca said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re right about her being strong-minded, and she sure as hell didn’t hesitate to speak her mind.”

  “I’ll say,” Linda said with a chuckly laugh. “If you think it was tough being her stepson, you should’ve tried being her daughter-in-law.”

  “Yeah, but when it came to final decisions, she was just as old-school as he was. It’s the husband, the papà, who decides, and he does it on his own. He doesn’t take a vote.”

  “That’s true,” Linda said, “and there’s something else. I don’t know about you, Luca, but I’m not really positive that Nola understood what was in that will. For one thing, she never did learn to read that well. For another—and Severo told me this—she seemed to think that if she didn’t look at it when she signed it, it might get around that evil eye she was worried about. So she kept her eyes closed. Severo had to guide her hand to the right place.”

  “Hadn’t heard that,” Luca said. “Sounds right, though.”

  “What did the third sentence say?” Gideon said.

  Luca had to think for a moment. “Oh, yeah, that was the short one. It names Severo as executor. That’s it.”

  “I don’t get it,” Marti said. “If I understand you right, it says that Franco gets it
all, whoever predeceases whoever, right? So what’s Cesare’s grievance? What’s the lawyer expect to get for him?”

  “That I can’t tell you. I’m already confused enough. Maybe she’s going to say Nola could have fought to change the will, if she’d lived. Severo thinks it’s just that she wants to get it hauled into court. Once that happens, all bets are off.”

  “Just like in the States,” Marti said.

  “Not only that,” said Linda, “but the way things work here, once the lawyers really get their teeth into it, it’ll be tied up for, like, the next ten years, and everything around here would be in limbo.”

  “Just like in the States,” Marti said again, and hoisted her glass in toast. “Here’s to Shakespeare’s finest quote—”

  “Henry VI!” someone said

  And then, amidst general laughter spontaneous enough to turn heads: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

  TWENTY

  THE following morning Gideon was on his own. Julie and Marti were learning how to make zabaglione, and John had turned down his invitation to join him at the Museo Galileo, formerly the Museo di Storia della Scienze, in Florence. Having the morning to himself suited him fine. The museum, which he also had pretty much to himself, was housed in yet another gorgeous sixteenth-century palazzo (yawn) on the Arno. The building directly abutted the Uffizi, but while the line to enter that celebrated museum already wound around the corner at nine thirty in the morning, getting into the Galileo was simply a matter of walking through the human-size entry cut into the great wooden portal and paying one’s eight euros at the desk.

  Once having paid, he paused in the anteroom to call Rocco and suggest lunch if the tenente was available. Rocco was all for it and recommended a little mom-and-pop place he liked on Via della Condotta, a block or so from the Piazza Signoria. “Good food, and we can be in and out in half an hour.”

  Gideon wasn’t ordinarily a quick eater, but after last night’s three-hour marathon, “in and out in half an hour” sounded wonderful, and they agreed to meet at one.

  “There are a couple of quick things I should probably tell you now, though,” Gideon said. “I don’t really know how important they are. Do you know about the will Pietro and Nola had? What was in it, I mean?”

  “It might be in the file somewhere, or maybe Martignetti knows about it, but, no, I don’t think I’m familiar with it. So tell me. But make it short.”

  Gideon explained about what he’d heard at Nonna Natalia the previous night. He could hear Rocco’s pen or pencil scratching away intermittently.

  “Oh, and the situation with Cesare’s suit has changed since you heard about it too. Now he’s contesting the entire will. Says it’s invalid because Pietro was killed first.”

  “That doesn’t make sense to me. Same will, what’s the difference?”

  “I know. Severo thinks his lawyer just figures if you open up a can of worms, something good’s bound to come out of it.”

  “Out of a can of worms?”

  “Bad metaphor.”

  “Hold on,” Rocco said. “I got a call coming in from Martignetti.”

  The call must have been on a different telephone because Gideon heard what was said, or rather the start of what was said.

  “Si, Tonino, che si dice?”

  Martignetti’s reply was audible, if only barely. “Houston, abbiamo un problema.”

  A few seconds later, Rocco jumped back on the line with Gideon: “I think I better hang up, Gid. See you at one—no, make it one thirty. Leave your cell phone on in case I can’t make it at all.” He clicked off, leaving Gideon to wonder what was up. If the problema The museum was a bigger place than he’d expected, with more rooms, and as far as he knew there were no more than half a dozen visitors in it. It was a shame, he thought, that science drew so paltry an audience, but it certainly made museum-going a lot more pleasant than those folks had it in the next building over. He was able to wander at his leisure and pause as long as he wished at the objects that caught his interest. Of which there were many: evocative, sepia-colored antique maps, huge sixteenth-century globes made to adorn royal apartments, fabulous golden armillary spheres that had tracked the heavens five hundred years ago. There were six-foot-long wooden astronomical telescopes, an ingenious sixteenth century calculator, frightening old surgical instruments, and even an eighteenth-century “mechanical paradox” in which a cylinder placed at the bottom of a set of rails rolled quite indubitably upward when released.

  And of course there was a room devoted to Galileo Galilei, which Gideon saved for last, like dessert, and in which he wandered, blissfully absorbed, for almost an hour. There were prisms that the great man had used in his experiments with light, his magnetic lodestones, his precious, wood-and-leather occhialino (little eye) that future generations would call a microscope.

  There was even a skeletal remnant for the anthropologist in him: in a transparent, egg-shaped reliquary filigreed with gold resided the gracefully extended middle finger of Galileo’s right hand, pointing straight up.

  • • •

  THREE blocks from where Gideon stood pondering the implications of that upraised middle finger (a last message from beyond the grave to the Inquisition that had so hounded and persecuted him in his last years?) lay the rest of the scientist’s remains. Housed in a suitably grand marble tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, they had rested for almost three hundred years alongside those of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Leonardo Bruni.

  In front of the basilica was the usual broad piazza, at the far end of which, perhaps three hundred feet from the great façade, Rocco Gardella stood before the window of a top-floor apartment, his back to the famous scene. The building in which he stood was yet another restored old palazzo, distinctly upscale, with rental prices to match, but this particular apartment was anything but. The place was squalid, fetid. There were microwave trays and bowls of congealing food from more than one meal—more than five or six meals—on the kitchen counter, on the stove, in the sink. Some of them had been there so long mold was growing on them. There were blackened banana peels, shriveled brown apple cores, cups of caffe latte in which the milk had curdled halfway to yogurt. Emptied, unrinsed cans of soup, beans, and stewed fruit filled the sink. Candy wrappers everywhere. Discarded clothing, mostly socks and underwear, lay in tangled clumps and piles on the floors of all three rooms, and the bathroom as well. The whole place stank of rotting food, dirty laundry, and mildewed towels. Rocco, thinking about rats, had moved with care in looking into dark corners or closets when he’d first arrived, but if there were rats around, they’d scurried into the walls by now.

  His attention was fixed on a bed containing yet another set of mortal remains. This one was curled on its side among twisted, grungy sheets, dressed in a shirt and trousers, and still wearing shoes. Bent over the body was the medico legale, doing what they do at such scenes: pressing eyeballs, raising limbs and letting them drop, sniffing at the dead, wide-open mouth. With them in the apartment were a photographer, along with two crime-scene officers busily plying their forceps, plastic envelopes, and mysterious lights, sprays, and powders. Maresciallo Antonio Martignetti was also there, wandering around and poking into drawers and closets.

  Ordinarily, the death of a known addict under circumstances that practically screamed overdose wouldn’t be getting the level of scrutiny that this one was, but when the addict himself happened to be a suspect, or at the very least a potential material witness, in a double murder currently under investigation, a different level of effort was called for. And this particular corpse, the former Cesare Baccarreda Cubbiddu had fit that description to a T.

  Happily (from Rocco’s point of view), Captain Conforti hadn’t felt that it was necessary to bring in the public prosecutor yet, so there was no officious Migliorini clone to deal with. It was also fortunate, he thought, that the medico legale who had been assigned was the one he found easiest to work with, the round, smiling, and Buddha-like Dr. Melio Bosco
, the seventy-six-year-old physician who had been on the scene in the Casentinese when the Cubbiddus’ skeletons had been found.

  Bosco had been at it for twenty minutes, and when he straightened up he did it with a groan. “My lumbar spine’s getting too old for this, Rocco,” he said, kneading his back with the fingers of both hands. “I need to find a new line of work, something easy. Look into applying to the Carabinieri, maybe. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Melio, it is awfully easy work. Wouldn’t be challenging enough for you. So, how long has he been dead?”

  Bosco stripped off his gloves, tossed them into his bag, and steepled his fingers before his chest. “I would say that it was somewhere between six and twelve hours ago—thirteen to be on the safe side—that this gentleman embarked on his passage across the Styx with that ferryman of ghosts, grave Charon at his oar.”

  “Dante?”

  “Euripides.”

  “See, that’s what I mean. You’re too smart for the Carabinieri. Six to thirteen hours. So that’d be, uh, eight o’clock or so last night at the earliest, four o’clock this morning at the latest?”

  “Say, you’re pretty smart yourself.”

  “Anything to say on the . . . wait a minute . . . yeah, on the cause of death?”

  “Heart failure, I would guess.”

  “Induced by a cocaine overdose?”

  “Let’s wait for the toxicology report on that, but the circumstances would seem to point us in that direction, wouldn’t you agree?” He nodded toward the marble-topped nightstand beside the bed, with a number of items scattered across its surface: a nail clipper, a ring of keys, a bottle of cough medicine, a couple of ballpoints, some used, wadded tissues. And, more significantly, what was known in the trade as a snuff kit: a makeup-size mirror, a single-edge razor blade, a tiny spoon, a three-inch-long copper tube about the diameter of a drinking straw, and a little bottle with a bit of white sediment in it. Alongside them was the open case, made of expensive leather, that had held them neatly in their places with elastic loops and zippered pockets. It was called a snuff kit because, when advertised for sale, it was uniformly described as a set of accessories for those who took snuff. Advertisers with a sense of humor sometimes made a point of stating that it was never, ever, under any circumstances, to be used for inhaling illegal substances. Rocco had run across a lot of these in his time, but he had yet to run into one owned by an actual snuff-taker. In fact, he had yet to run into an actual snuff-taker.